DAVID THORSTAD (introduction and translation)
Kurt Hiller 1903 PHOTO/Wikipedia
Introduction
This article, titled “A Chapter of Russian Reaction,” translated into English here for the first time, was written in German by longtime homosexual activist Kurt Hiller (1885-1972) from London and published in the Swiss gay journal Der Kreis in 1946. Hiller had been active in Germany’s first homosexual-rights organization, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee (Scientific Humanitarian Committee), headed by Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935). Founded in 1897, the committee was Germany’s most prominent gay group. Its central campaign was reform of Paragraph 175 of the penal code, which criminalized “unnatural lewdness between persons of the male sex.”
In the group’s first meeting following World War I, in August 1920, it set up a united-front “action committee” of gay groups to fight for repeal of Paragraph 175, and Hiller was chosen to head it. At the 1928 congress in Copenhagen of the World League for Sexual Reform, Hirschfeld read a paper on the subject of homosexual oppression written by Hiller titled “Appeal to the Second International Congress for Sexual Reform on Behalf of an Oppressed Human Variety.”1
Hiller’s article “Ethical Tasks of Homosexuals” is one of the most compelling to come out of the pre-Stonewall gay movement. It first appeared in the July 1913 issue of the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types), the publication of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. (My translation of this article can be seen here: www.williamapercy.com/wiki/index.php?title=David_Thorstad.)
As John Lauritsen and I wrote in our book on the early homosexual rights movement: “The last of an irregular series of ‘Newsletters’ of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee was published in February 1933, by Kurt Hiller. In July of the same year, Hiller was arrested and sent to the Oranienburg concentration camp. He was fortunate to be released nine months later, after nearly dying from mistreatment in the concentration camp, and he left Germany.”2 Here is an excerpt where Hiller speaks in German about his experiences in Nazi captivity: www.etuxx.com/diskussionen/toene/hiller.mp3.
The tsarist law punishing homosexual sex was abolished following the Russian Revolution. But in 1934, less than two decades later, Stalin recriminalized same-sex sexual acts. When André Gide visited the USSR in 1935-36, he reported that homosexuals were considered counterrevolutionaries.
Hiller says that “even the dumbest peasant could grasp the cruelty and idiocy” of laws against same-sex behavior. No doubt. But there was virtually no criticism of Stalin’s antihomosexual policy from any communist (or even oppositionist) groups until after the 1969 Stonewall Riots that gave a new impulse to the struggle for gay rights and sexual freedom that had begun in the middle of the nineteenth century. The erasure of almost all leftist support for gay rights following the reaction under Stalin, and the dearth of criticism of the USSR’s antisex policies, make Hiller’s article all the more striking. It is written in his usual pithy style and is a unique document that deserves to be rescued from oblivion.
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